Vice (15 page)

Addington, the Pentagon source added, could read the draft of an appropriations bill in one day and ferret out the one paragraph that wasn't supposed to be there: "He would fix that one paragraph, and he would know exactly which undersecretary had been over there on the Hill freelancing." After cleaning up the bill, Addington would "add a corrected provision that might adversely affect the undersecretary and send him a little message."

At the Pentagon, it sometimes seemed as if David Addington was training Dick Cheney to be vice president—or perhaps president. Almost every decision started in Addington's office, where he would meet with "the uniforms," civilians—even the Joint Chiefs. Then he would take his decisions in to Cheney, who would be briefed. When necessary, Addington would take the parties into Cheney's office. Addington, by intellect and force of personality, took charge and dealt with the details. "He allowed Cheney to be the chief."

"Addington was always deeply involved in issues," the Pentagon source says. "But he was always in the background. If you wanted to get something to Cheney, you did it through Addington. For three years it was the best-run operation you could imagine. It worked because Addington ran it on behalf of the Secretary of Defense."

Addington also worked on appropriations, which Cheney mastered by collaborating with
Jack Murtha
, the Pennsylvania Democrat who chaired the
House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense
. Murtha is an institutional politician, always aware of and insinuating himself into positions of power in the House. When Cheney was appointed secretary of defense, Murtha hosted a dinner for Cheney and his wife and the Appropriations Subcommittee members—known as the cardinals—and their spouses. It was an invitation to collaborate—and a showcase of Murtha's influence on "Approps." Cheney, Murtha, Addington, and a few high-ranking officers from the Pentagon managed DOD appropriations and developed a working relationship between the Congress and the uniforms, to ensure that in a time of shrinking budgets, no vital weapons systems or bases were cut. Powell was intimately involved in appropriations. But difficult problems were resolved by discussions between Murtha and Cheney.

Murtha is a hawkish former marine and Vietnam veteran who has cultivated close ties to the military. Congressional staff traveling with him on congressional delegation trips ("codels") complain that he spends so much time listening to enlisted men that schedules are difficult to keep. Cheney and Murtha remained close friends when Cheney became Bush's vice president, which later made Murtha's harsh criticism of the Bush-Cheney White House so loaded. "I like guys who got five deferments and have never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done," Murtha said in November 2005. One of Murtha's staff members insisted the Democratic congressman's statement didn't pertain to Cheney, but that was a hard sell. Cheney is the only high-profile member of the Bush administration who had five draft deferments and is making decisions that put American soldiers at risk.

Some of Cheney's critics claim the Pentagon brass was hostile to Cheney because he was a secretary of defense who had avoided service in Vietnam. (After all, during his confirmation Cheney had said, "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service.") A retired officer who was at the Pentagon while Cheney was there disagreed. "I never saw it," he says. "Everyone immediately saw he was a good administrator who had good relations with Congress. That's what matters. Rumsfeld came over as a former Navy pilot and within six months no one in the building wanted to talk to him because he is so arrogant. Cheney came over here aware that he knew nothing about defense issues. Cheney and David [Addington] listened."

Wilkerson, a career officer who worked for Colin Powell at the Pentagon and State Department, also says Cheney's deferments were not an issue. "There may have been a little grumbling," the retired officer says. But he added that Cheney was far too good at what he did, and far too protective of the interests of the armed forces, to engender much hostility. Wilkerson describes a moment at the end of the Gulf War at which the very officers who might have been expected to be Cheney's critics publicly embraced him. "It was at the National Military Command Center at Fort Leavenworth. Everyone got together, all the military types, and presented Cheney with an honorary certificate of graduation from the Command General Staff College. The little speeches that accompanied that. . . were quite poignant."

While Dick Cheney's first big challenge as secretary of defense was the U.S. attack on
Panama
, his defining moment was the first Gulf War. The textbook success of both ventures perhaps convinced him that invading Iraq in 2003 would be quick work, followed by Iraqis tossing rose petals at American soldiers as they prepared to move east into Iran. Though he never wore a uniform, Cheney had been involved in every American military adventure since the Korean War: Vietnam,
Grenada
, Nicaragua, Panama, the Gulf War, and
Afghanistan
. If he missed
Somalia
and
Bosnia
, the company he directed had won big, lucrative contracts in both attempts at nation building.

The
invasion of
Panama was a textbook exercise in regime change. Initially a CIA asset, Panamanian president
Manuel Noriega
had become impossible for the American president to control. Noriega's thugs had beaten and bloodied their boss's opponent in the presidential race. Panamanian soldiers had shot one American serviceman and briefly detained an American lieutenant (and his wife, whom they threatened to sexually assault). They also arrested a CIA operative who was operating a clandestine radio station. It wasn't hostile warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, but for the first Bush administration, a sufficient casus belli to invade a country and remove a thuggish regime.

Cheney had been six months on the job at the Pentagon when the senior George Bush made the decision to attack Panama. It was a decision made in careful collaboration with Cheney, who was attentive to detail, aware of the larger
foreign policy
context of the invasion, and not hesitant to put overenthusiastic generals on short leashes. At one point he questioned plans to use the Stealth bomber, a high-tech radar-evading aircraft designed to penetrate Soviet defenses. (He reluctantly signed off on it, though he regretted it later.) He refused to allow the lieutenant's wife to do a TV interview in which she would have described the sexual taunts of Noriega's soldiers, arguing that it would only be inflammatory. He cut one target from the list of sites to bomb, complaining about a Stealth attack on a Noriega hangout. And he went after Congress for encroaching on the executive's authority to conduct foreign policy. Members of Congress, whom Cheney caustically referred to as "my former colleagues," were "literally calling [executive branch] agencies downtown, or even people in Panama," Cheney complained. "That creates all kinds of problems. [They] certainly complicate our lives when they run out and make public pronouncements in front of the press, knowing only half of what there is to know." Cheney also refused to provide New York congressman
Charles Rangel
copies of combat videos shot by Apache helicopters in Panama. Rangel was responding to numerous complaints that most of the civilians killed died in Apache attacks on civilian targets.

The assault on Panama bore all the signature marks for which Dick Cheney would become known. Willingness to exercise broad executive authority, low regard for the role of Congress in foreign policy, high tolerance for non-American civilian casualties, and near-absolute secrecy. The assault, in which fifteen Americans died, was a technical success, even if it involved the conquest of a small country already occupied by thirteen thousand American troops. Cheney allowed only reporters based in the United States to cover the war, so he could slow the credentialing process and thus slow the coverage, although there were fully credentialed bilingual American reporters on the ground in Panama. The result was sporadic coverage of the "war," in which hostilities lasted only a few days. Critics of the invasion, including the Catholic Church in Panama, insist that far more Panamanians died than the two hundred civilians listed in official American reports. The Catholic Church, no great friend of Noriega, said deaths numbered in the thousands. The use of the Stealth bomber in an attack in which the resistance was so feeble that only fifty Panamanian soldiers died was something of an embarrassment. More embarrassing was the fact that the 100-million-dollar bomber was far off target when it dropped its bombs. (Cheney was furious when he learned the Air Force had kept him in the dark about the Stealth's failure.) The operation took a while to achieve its objective, the capture of General Manuel Noriega. The Panamanian dictator eluded the army and took sanctuary in the offices of the papal nuncio. Rather than violate the sanctity of a church that was also a diplomatic mission, U.S. forces surrounded the nuncio's residence and played high-decibel rock music until Noriega and his host could endure it no longer and he surrendered to American forces.

"Operation Just Cause" in Panama was a dress rehearsal for the larger military adventure to follow, when Iraq's president Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. From the moment intelligence reports indicated that Saddam
Hussein's
troops appeared to be preparing to
invade Kuwait
, Cheney was at the center of the military campaign known as
Desert Storm
. The first
Gulf War
was Dick Cheney's war as much as it was George Bush's war. It began with yet another Iran-Contra connection. Saudi ambassador
Prince Bandar
had moved $25 million from the Saudis to the Contras, working with CIA director William Casey. He was also a friend of the Bush family. Powell had misgivings about Bandar; Cheney had none.

It was Bandar who initially informed Bush that Hussein's behavior had the Saudis worried. And it was Bandar with whom Bush negotiated, sending Cheney to Saudi Arabia on a critical diplomatic mission to persuade the Saudis to accept U.S. ground forces. Before the ground war in Iraq started in late February 1991, Cheney had flown to Riyadh four times. Yet on the road to the Gulf War, Cheney was cautious. Not as cautious as Powell, but not overeager to push the country into war. The story line for the American public was that Hussein had invaded a sovereign nation. The concern within the administration was that Hussein had designs on the oilfields of Saudi Arabia.

Cheney was practical. Given the alternatives of attacking Hussein or deploying a force to defend Saudi Arabian oil, he argued that it was better to avoid a direct confrontation with Hussein's million-man army. He was critical of Bush's personal attacks on Hussein, complaining to Brent Scow-croft that the overheated rhetoric was putting the lives of American soldiers at risk. And he cautioned Bush against ordering American sailors to board Iraqi tankers to signal the beginning of a blockade.

Cheney's August 1991 trip to Saudi Arabia to meet with
King Fahd
was critical to the success of a large mission to deter the Iraqis. Cheney, accompanied by Paul Wolfowitz and General
Norman Schwarzkopf
, imposed the American plan upon the reluctant and difficult king. There would be no caps on the size of the American force deployed in Saudi Arabia. Nor would there be any fixed date by which troops would depart. They would remain "until justice is achieved," Cheney told Fahd, adding that they would leave when the king asked them to leave. Cheney used classified satellite intelligence to convince the king of Hussein's intentions, and went to great lengths to emphasize the gravity of Iraqi troops amassed on his border and the impossibility of a U.S. mission to stop Hussein once he moved into Saudi Arabia. Fahd, the custodian of the two holiest sites of Islam, was being asked to accept the presence of troops from the country that was Israel's financial and military underwriter. Cheney wouldn't allow him time to think it over.

Once the decision was made to go to war, Cheney turned his attention to the generals who would do the fighting. "He looked at the war plan and was appalled by its lack of creativity and tore it to pieces," says a former defense aide on Sam Nunn's staff. Cheney spent days with Colin Powell, poring over war plans, pushing Powell, and leaning on the generals doing the planning. He personally got on the phone with, and in the faces of, the generals who were drawing up the war plans. "He wasn't a micromanager like McNamara," says one of the generals involved in the planning. "And he wasn't arrogant like Rumsfeld. He wanted this one done right." Cheney joined Powell in arguing for the "enhanced option"—adding a hundred thousand more troops to the American contingent in Saudi Arabia, bringing troop strength to half a million. It was his moment to end the country's Vietnam War
syndrome
. "The military is finished in this society if we screw this up," he told Prince Bandar.

Cheney and Powell agreed on most issues regarding the war. But they had one fundamental disagreement regarding weapons. As they were flying back from the Persian Gulf in the run-up to the war, Powell pulled out a report he had ordered his staff to complete. It was a proposal to retire the Army's tactical nuclear weapons arsenal. The copy of the report Powell handed Cheney as the two men flew home from Saudi Arabia was covered with critical marginalia, all in the hand of David Addington. Addington and Wolfowitz had strong objections to giving up nuclear weapons that Powell said were inaccurate, expensive to maintain, and irrelevant in a modern arsenal of sophisticated conventional weapons. Cheney dismissed Powell, saying "not one of my civilian advisers supports you." Powell would prevail—after a
Gulf War
in which the Army's tactical nuclear weapons were not necessary. In September 2002, President Bush overruled Cheney and implemented Powell's recommendations.

In the Gulf War, Cheney saw a limited role for Congress, just as he had in the Panama operation. Despite the fact that going to war with Iraq would be a larger undertaking than the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Cheney argued that the president did not need the consent of Congress. He seemed more understanding of King Fahd's polling the royal family and calling Arab leaders than he was of Bush's willingness to go to Congress for consent. He told Bob Woodward that after meeting with his House colleagues, he remembered that four months before Pearl Harbor, the House had approved an extension of the Selective Service System by only one vote. Bush took his case to Congress. The Senate voted 52 to 47, the House 250 to 183, to approve the "all means necessary" resolution.